FOCUS
The FinOps Foundation has launched FOCUS (FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification), a new project aimed at creating a common specification for cloud cost, usage, and billing data. This initiative seeks to address the challenges associated with understanding and managing cloud costs across multiple providers and complex enterprise environments.
Let’s be honest, anybody involved in FinOps face a daunting challenge: collecting, normalizing, and analyzing disparate cloud billing data to deliver insightful reports and recommendations that drive more business value from cloud investments.
Billing data from cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) providers, cloud software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendors, and other Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) streams into organizations every day, but each vendor employs unique terminology, taxonomy, and metrics in their billing file. This complexity slows down FinOps practice, as the data ingestion and normalization takes time.
Focus goals:
– Establish a consistent structure for reporting cloud cost data
– Enable faster cloud adoption by increasing trust in cost data
– Facilitate mapping of costs to individual business units
Participants:
– AWS, Google, Microsoft and Oracle Cloud will offer FOCUS formatted cost and usage data.
Challenges Addressed:
– Confusion surrounding FinOps data, normalization among cloud providers
– Multi-cloud data driven decision making, removing complexity.
Scope:
– Initially focused on cloud vendors
– Plans to expand to SaaS vendors
Benefits and Impact
The FOCUS project aims to create a consistent data structure and nomenclature for presenting cloud cost information. This standardization is expected to help businesses gain a single, comprehensive view of their cloud spend across multiple providers and services.
By addressing the complexities of cloud cost management, FOCUS seeks to make FinOps practices more accessible and effective for organizations of all sizes, potentially leading to improved cost accountability and efficiency in cloud resource utilization.
Find out more https://focus.finops.org
